Pluralistic Ignorance

One topic that has been brought up in class has been the idea of pluralistic ignorance and the idea of it, and how it may relate to the persisting "rape culture" we see in societies today. To start off this blog post I will first give a brief definition of what pluralistic ignorance is. Pluralistic ignorance is the tendency for people to misinterpret the thoughts and attitudes that other people have. When this occurs people will often make statements that does not reflect their own thoughts, but what they think other people want to hear, when in actuality most people are in the same position. For instance, we can look at the 'hooking up' scene that is occurring among university students. People think that hooking up is normal and participate in the act because they think its what other people think is normal, but really the majority of people are uncomfortable with it. Another interesting, but also touchy subject where pluralistic ignorance could be evident is in the "rape culture" in today's society. Rape culture is a term designed to show the ways that society normalized male sexual violence, sexual remarks against women, or even rape. You can often see examples of this portrayed in music videos were women are depicted as sexual objects. How can one say the rape is normal? That's horrible. And clearly, you would think, one of right mind would not say that rape is normal. The thing is though, this whole rape culture is seen as normal, but why? This awful thing is occurring because of pluralistic ignorance. People may not feel empowered enough to speak out, maybe they want to fit in and act/say things that they think is socially acceptable and appealing to others. Maybe they think its funny, or cool, or whatever it  is, people are continuing to act this way because they think its normal and that they would be turned down or belittled if they spoke out. How can we stop this? If we can get people to realize what people actually think then a new 'norm' can form. This could be done through ways such as hosting interventions for self affirmation, or for peer pressure  control. Interventions on how to speak up, or interventions that simply inform the public about pluralistic ignorance. Just as new cultural ideas and norms can be made in culture, lets hope that very soon there is a new cultural norm that minimizes the on going rape culture we are experiencing in this present time and age.